Composer Andrew Norman

So yesterday I went up to see Paige play in one of a series of concerts put on by her university orchestra, for which she is the harpist. This one featured music by Andrew Norman, a modern composer, born on Halloween, 1979, who was educated at USC and Yale. He is currently the Composer in Residence for the LA Chamber Orchestra. Norman's atonal pieces have won wide acclaim and have been performed by several notable ensembles, including the LA and New York Philharmonics. Among many accolades, he was named Musical America's 2017 Composer of the Year, and he was a finalist for the 2012 Pulitzer Prize in Music.

Andrew Norman was present at last night's performance and spoke to the audience about what inspires him. He's very intrigued by architecture, and the first piece on the program, Farnsworth: Four Portraits of a House, is a musical representation of four different viewing angles of a midcentury modern house, The Farnsworth House, in Plano, IL. The piece is scored for four clarinets, a violin, a flute, and percussion (in this case, a marimba was used.) The clarinets, or "House Ensemble", take center stage and express the architectural form of the house, while the remaining four instruments, the "Nature Ensemble", are spread out in a wide rectangle (last night, the flautist and violinist were in the audience on opposite sides of the hall, and the pianist and percussionist were on far sides of the stage) and make sounds intended to represent the fluctuating state of the natural environment surrounding the house.  The next piece was Try, which Norman describes as "messy and fragmented." It represents the process of trial and error inherent in composing. Musicians in the orchestra produce a series of experimental sounds and have some latitude to produce different sounds at every performance. Toward the end of the performance, the pianist and percussionist appear to get into a "musical argument" that culminates with the pianist asserting a piece of musical material that seems to satisfy him. In the final piece, Switch, Norman experiments with "control and agency" to illustrate the degree of freedom individual musicians have in an orchestra. When a percussionist would hit one wood block, the violins would, for example, stop playing and the cellos would start. When he hit another, the situation would be reversed. This piece also plays with physical gestures and sonics. For example, when the violinists would suddenly stop playing, in response to a "command" from the percussionist, they would freeze with their bows held high.

His work is clever and imaginative. I must be a complete philistine because none of his pieces sounded like music to me. Instead, they sounded like random scritching, scratching, and banging, frequently interspersed with periods of total silence, during which the musical energy and power of the orchestra were squandered.

His pieces reminded me of an unpleasant auditory (and visual!) experience I had a few weeks back. I was sitting in our basement family room, when I heard some movement from behind the gas fireplace -- a series of rustling and scratching sounds punctuated by periods of stillness. Suddenly I heard loud metallic banging and clanging, as though someone was trying to break in with a crowbar! Then, to my horror, a little mouse burst out of the fireplace and ran around the hearth, its feet making raspy, whispering sounds. That mouse was the Andrew Norman of the rodent world. I sprinkled the entire basement and fireplace with two large bottles of peppermint oil, which is to mice what garlic cloves and crucifixes are to vampires, and we have had no more mice or scritching sounds since. Alas, I had nothing similar to repel the abrasive, migraine-inducing cacophony of last night. My only solace was an adorable baby, who could be heard cooing softly during the silences and who provided the only sweet, melodic notes of the performance.

Please, Dr. Orchestra Director, could you select some nice, harmonious Romantic-era pieces for the next performance?

I picked Craig up the airport on my way home from Greeley this morning. Paige is coming home later today for spring break, which means cocktails and harp music😀